I went to college for 5.5 years, but more on that in another post.
The short of it is that I switched majors and had to play catchup on coursework for a teaching degree.
During my second senior year, I had to fill credit hours to achieve full-time student status.
So, in the Fall 2007 semester, I thought about taking a writing course. I’d always liked to write, but I had mainly wrote poetry and song lyrics. I chose the course that best fit my schedule: CW 104 - Introductory Narrative Writing.
Fate would have it that I would stumbled into the classroom of John Griswold.
He looked every part of a writer. Slight build, glasses, fair skin. Although, he wasn’t eerily translucent like he spent all day in a basement at a typewriter. John looked like a man who enjoyed being outside during his summers off when he wasn’t writing.
This class proved to be one of my best experiences in college.
I had never been required to produce as much and with consistent feedback as during John’s class.
We worked in cycles with 3 weeks between each short story deadline. Throughout the semester, we practiced writing, read the classics and commented our peers’ work.
It was wonderful.
John provided many great lessons.
For one submission, he applauded my use of the word hoist to describe a woman lifting up a sheet. Then a moment later, he annihilated my confidence by letting me know that, “the story ends on the first page.” So much for the other 13 pages.
He taught us the difference between “balling” and “bawling” your eyes out. The former providing me with an image I’ll never shake.
He told me to not write about things I knew nothing about. For example, when I tried to tell the story of a drunk farmer’s son who inherited the family farm, he asked, “Where are you from? Have you ever been to a farm?”
But John’s biggest lesson is one he shared with us over and over again.
. . .
John used the chalkboard a handful of times during our semester. The most impactful time came when he showed us Freytag’s Pyramid.
I can remember drawing a version of the below in margins of a short story.
In a moment—that I only realize now—John ruined most modern fiction for me because a single word: denouement.
Maybe I was attracted and attached to it because of its Frenchness. After all, I was a romantic Spanish major.
But what I realized over the course of the semester, and even my life, is that sometimes we are writing for the payoff without considering the story along the way.
Writing for the aha is too much. John would tell us that the narrative doesn’t support it.
John often said, “endings are as important as beginnings.” Or at least that’s the way I remember it.
He could see the sloppiness at the end of our drafts, and he encouraged us to clean it up.
He pointed to the lack of enthusiasm in the final pages compared to the first, and he cheered us on.
He charged us to take care of our characters, and he showed us how to shepherd them.
He wanted all of us to be better, and he did that with the intention and attention that only the very best teachers possess.
A Quote from Mastery by Robert Greene
“Throughout your life you will encounter tedious situations, and you must cultivate the ability to handle them with discipline.”
Mastery, Robert Greene (p. 60)
** Click here to find out about my mission to finish this book by the end of 2020. **